Posts Tagged ‘Kickstarter’

OK, we’re live! Thank you all for stopping by and checking out the preview last time, and please spread the word on this project! We’re looking forward to getting the dragons made, especially, but all 4 designs are fun additions to the Tinker line of goodies.

Yes, it’s been a while. Yes, I have a lot of things I could and would like to write about.

For now, though, I’m short on time. I wanted to show this design, though, for the Dragon Tinker Metal Meeple that I’d like to get made in a Kickstarter project later this year. The “Dame”, “Fairy” and Top Hat” designs included for scale (the Top Hat gentleman is pretty standard meeple size, at 20mm tall or so, meaning this Dragon would be about 30mm tall, or 1 and 1/6″). The Dragon has a normal mechanized Dragon side, and an “aged” side, to give it a bit of gravitas. This also allows me to hint that it would be made of different metals, given that some parts don’t show the aging.

This is the last design I’ve had in mind for now, though I certainly can come up with others, and there are some Carcassonne expansion meeples that I haven’t had time to work with yet. They are less popular, though, and possibly less usable out of that game, so we’re sticking with more universal designs for the moment. Like the Mad Scientist…

The Tinkerer…

and the Sky Pirate and Rocketeer…

Now, I really would like to get the Tinker Steampunk-flavored Carcassonne tile variant designs done. They will take a bit more time, of course, and since I can’t really sell them, they will be a back burner “labor of love” sort of thing.

Then there’s the Pantheon Wars game, the Fudging Fates dice and this other game I’m designing, tentatively calling it Shattervale… there’s a lot to do.

Has it really been six months since I posted last? Sorry about that, it’s been somewhat crazy around here.

I do have more Operation Backlog things to write about, and a bit to say about a recent sojourn in World of Warcraft that ended on a sour note, but for today, it’s a quick mention of a new Tinker project that we have up and running over on Kickstarter. We’re going to get a bunch of these little guys made:

We’re funded already, thanks to some fantastic early adopters, so at this point, we’re just looking for as many people as we can to get these spread far and wide. I would love to see these little guys all over the place, popping up in different games and locations, always making people happy to have them.

No, things like this aren’t necessities, but there’s just something fun about little bits of treasure like this. If you’re interested, please check out the campaign, and maybe tell a few others about it. The more the merrier!

Once upon a time, I designed a small “area control” tile-capture game for a game development exercise. I called it Alpha Hex, a simple, abstract name for a simple, abstract game. It has evolved over the years, and I’m looking for ways to bring it to market as a tabletop board game. Perhaps someday it can be released as a tablet game as well, but for today, it’s a Print and Play game in what I call a “Paper Beta” format. We would greatly appreciate your help in taking a look at the game and seeing just how well it works, or doesn’t, as the case may be. It’s been fantastic so far in our experiments and testing.

Please print out the files below and give it a try! If you will tell your friends about it, all the better!

It’s ready to play, though we are keeping an eye on how well it plays, and we are trying to make sure it has sufficient depth to offer good value. We have plans to add another wrinkle to this particular game, the Deity Cards, but at the moment, I’d like to get this out into the wild to see what sort of feedback we can gather. If you have the time and inclination, please take a look at the game, and if you can tell us how it played for you, we’d love to hear it.

Pantheon Wars: The Fall of Ra is an “area control” game played on a 39-cell board. You can play a shorter game on the 19 cells in the middle, which is how we have done most of our testing to date, but both work well. Players compete to control the most tiles, with ties decided by control of the Nile river and delta cells on the board. Tiles played on the board stay where they were played, but control of those tiles shifts as the game proceeds. Success comes from smart play and careful planning.

If you have played Triple Triad, you will probably easily understand the core mechanics, but I’ve tried to keep the rules clean enough and the basic ruleset simple enough that it doesn’t require knowing that game. Pantheon Wars: The Fall of Ra is designed specifically around being easy to learn, but with enough complexity in play decisions and circumstances that there is room for careful thought and skill testing. Players find that to be true in testing, and it’s my hope that getting some new people to look at the game will let us refine it further where needed.

I call the game a “beta”, but it’s really one that has been through several cycles of development already. I’d be happy with the game being released into the wild as-is, since we’ve had a lot of fun with it and so have our testers to date. Still, there is room for polish, and when we get the Deity Cards polished up, we will need to give them a thorough period of testing as well.

We would love to get this made as a commercial product, too, and I’ve been investigating options for a Kickstarter project to make that happen. Before we do that, though, testing the game some more is in order, and the more people we can reach to get this tested, the better. More eyes can also mean a better launch for the game if we do get to take it to Kickstarter.

If you have the time and interest, then, please download the files below and print them out. It should give you all you need to play the game with 2 to 6 players. I print the board and tiles on photo paper and then mount them on matboard, then cut them out, to give a better feel to them and more durability, but you should be able to play the game if you just use simple paper on everything. I’m happy to answer questions about the game, either here or over on our Facebook page:

I would also love to ask you questions about how the game worked for you. If you are willing to let me ask you some questions, or just want to ask some, please contact me at tishtoshtesh@gmail.com with “Fall of Ra” somewhere in your email subject line.

Thank you all!

If you want these all in a single .PDF file, it’s presently hosted over on Dropbox at this link (though the rule text has since been tweaked a little bit for clarity, they function the same way):

If you’ve perused the photo library of the Gearpunk dice, you might have noted that the Zinc-finished dice are rather shiny, especially when compared to the brass and copper variants.

Gearpunk D10 Decader Antiqued Copper

Gearpunk D10 Decader Antiqued Brass/Bronze

Gearpunk D10 Decader Zinc

I’m partial to the antiqued look, both because I like the more rustic aesthetic, and because the antiquing makes the dice easier to read. Since the factory managed to mangle our order’s quantities, we wound up with over 100 extra shiny Zinc D10 “decader” dice. One of them seemed like the perfect test subject, then, to see what sort of simple inking options I might have. I’ll be trying other experiments, but this is the initial test, which I’m pleased with.

I used Speedball “super black” India ink, water and a small hobby paintbrush.

Though I picked up mine in a set of three at the local hobby store for $2. It doesn’t need to be an expensive brush, just one that will hold a point when wet and is about 1/8″ in diameter or so.

I put eight drops of water and three drops of ink in a plastic cup for this experiment. I diluted the ink to give myself a little time for the ink to dry. When used straight, the ink dries fairly quickly, and I wanted a little wiggle room in case I messed up. This experiment really doesn’t need a lot of ink, either. I would have been fine with 1 drop of ink and 2 drops of water in retrospect, though it’s not a bad thing to have a bit more than necessary… and it’s not like a few drops really put much of a dent in my supply. That’s the nice thing about this ink; it’s great to use, even when diluted.

I used the brush to pick up a bit of the ink, then gently applied it to the background behind the numbers on the die face. The water tension naturally makes the ink settle into the recesses, though I did need to guide it around a little. I added a little with a light touch to the other recesses in the design, and brushed lightly to help spread things around and get some ink in the smaller details around the edges and corners.

Since the ink does run a bit, I did only one face at a time, the one facing up and its edges. Inking the adjacent faces would mean the ink would pool largely on the downhill side of the contours, and while I didn’t want a flat color, neither did I want it heavily lopsided.

Each face, then, took a few minutes to dry. That’s not too bad, and if I were doing a set of dice, one face at a time per die, by the time I finished with the last die’s upright face, the first die could be ready to roll over and do the next face. It’s best if you get each application dry before doing the next, so that timing might not work perfectly, but all in all, it wasn’t too much of a wait.

I’m sorry I didn’t have my camera handy to take photos while I was working, this project had to fit in some of my very constrained time last night and I wasn’t properly prepared.

Here are some photos of the finished die next to one of its unprocessed kin, in a variety of lighting situations (including one that’s just a color correction, taking the yellows out of an indoor photo).

I think it turned out well, much better than I had expected. I’ll be doing more experiments when I can, but this was a good start, I think.

It’s been quiet around here lately. I’m still looking for work, and Unemployment is about exhausted. So, I still don’t have the luxury of spending much time here, and I’m… significantly stressed. Still, this is worth noting. The Gearpunk Dice that we’ve been waiting for since last year are finally here, so we’ll be shipping them out to everyone as soon as we can process them. Thank you for your interest and patience!

It’s worth noting that there are two photos of each single die. This is to show them in different lighting and against different surfaces, in this case, black leather and aged painted concrete.